Abstract
Chapter 3 will push the historical perspective further back into pre-colonial and colonial history by underscoring the way recent Native American efforts to counter the DAPL pipeline at Standing Rock insisted on a traditional orientation of water protection for generations to come, not merely political resistance. In setting up the “turn to water relations,” we will deeply explore the delirium of Euro-settlement around the river by way of Steve Newcomb’s layered analysis of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the finesse of creative “border-crossings” negotiated by enslaved denizens of the Strait as recovered in Tiya Miles’ storied treatment.
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Notes
- 1.
The insights offered below on the 1701 re-designation of the 32-mile bend of river between Lakes Erie and St. Clair as “the strait” belong to an on-going movement process and involvement in Detroit. One friend I am most indebted to—continuously learning from and collaborating with—is activist pastor Bill Wylie-Kellermann , whose exploration of water politics helped galvanize my own. Wylie-Kellermann has powerfully published on these events in the August 2014 issue of Critical Moment and the Fall 2014 issue of On the Edge, Detroit rags that stay close to the ground in reporting on local struggle.
- 2.
Although Oppenago is also apparently (according to settler Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s writing) the name of one of the tribes along the strait (Cadillac, 131–151); see also “Indian Villages, Reservations and Removals,” posted July 3, 2016, on website Detroit Urbanism: Recovering the History of Our Roads, Borders, and Built Environment, http://detroiturbanism.blogspot.com/2016/03/indian-villages-reservations-and-removal.html.
- 3.
According to Huron/Cree teacher Martín Prechtel in a lecture given during the summer of 2014 at Ojo Caliente, New Mexico.
- 4.
Again, Prechtel in his 2014 talk.
- 5.
Indeed, Newcomb will devote an entire chapter to comparing Hebrew scripture stories of the move of Abram (Abraham) from Ur of the Chaldees into the territory of the Canaanites as the tap root of the Chosen People-Promised Land and the Conquerer models of thinking animating Euro-Christian rationalization of colonial takeover of the Americas (Newcomb, 37–50). Chapters 6 and 7 will wrestle precisely with the accounts of early Israel’s relationship with Canaanites and the question of Canaanite indigeneity—largely agreeing that Israel became “settler colonial” in the land, but also that Canaanite indigenous practices amalgamated with Aramean and Bedouin pastoral nomad orientations, “underneath” Israel’s turn to monarchy and monotheism , as a troubling counter-memory.
- 6.
Now the Clinton River.
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Perkinson, J.W. (2019). Water Struggle Along the Border: Settler Colonialism and Christian Dominion. In: Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14998-7_3
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